Fritz Lenz

Fritz Lenz (1887 to 1976) was a German physician, human geneticist and racial hygienist. Born in Pflugrade in Pomerania, he studied medicine at Berlin, Breslau and Freiburg, took his doctorate at Freiburg in 1912 under Ludwig Aschoff, and qualified in hygiene at Munich in 1919. Under the influence of Alfred Ploetz he became an advocate of racial hygiene, the German form of eugenics, and in 1923 took the first German chair of that subject at Munich. With Erwin Baur and Eugen Fischer he wrote a handbook of human heredity and racial hygiene that tried to place human genetics on a systematic footing. His racial hygiene favoured a supposedly superior Nordic race, which made him welcome to the National Socialists, and in 1933 he took the Berlin chair and a department at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics. After the war he withdrew from racial hygiene, worked as a human geneticist at Göttingen and led its institute for human heredity until 1955.